Charter Communications
The American telecommunications and mass media company Charter Communication Inc. is one of its home country’s largest cable operators and pay-TV operators. The business giant, founded in 1993 by Barry Babock, Howard Wood and Jerald Kent, is behind only Comcast for total subscriber numbers for cable operators in the US. Comcast and AT&T are the only two companies larger than Charter in pay-TV. It also boasts impressive numbers as a telephone provider, being the fifth-largest based on residential lines. For further information and pricing on phone systems, click here.
Who Are Charter Communications?
Its size as a telecommunications company makes it one of the most successful corporations in the United States. In the Fortune 500 list of 2019, Charter came in at number 70 on the largest United Stations corporations by total revenue.
While it used to be based in St. Louis, Missouri, its appointment of Thomas Rutledge as CEO in late 2012 saw them relocate their headquarters to Stamford, Connecticut. However, the entirety of the company did not come with them, and many of Charter’s operations remained in St. Louis, where the company had first been founded over 20 years ago.
Charter Communications |
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Charter |
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Andover, MA |
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What is the History of Charter Communications?
When the company Charter Communications CATV Systems was founded in 1980 by Charles H. Leonard in Barry Country, Michigan, it took only a couple of years to merge with Spectrum Communications. A series of mergers and acquisitions followed, and by 1993, the company had been consolidated by the three previously mentioned businessmen. From this point, growth exploded. Charter paid around a staggering £300 million for a controlling interest in Crown Media Holdings in 1995 and simultaneously acquired Cable South.
- Two years later, company EarthLink collaborated with Charter to deliver high-speed internet access through cable modems that served Charter’s customers in Riverside, California and Los Angeles.
- The now-passed businessman Paul Allen bought a controlling interest in 1998.
- The company broke even more milestones by paying £2.8 billion to purchase Marcus Cable, a Dallas-based cable company. By this time, Charter Communications boasted an impressive 1 million customers.
- This was only the first stage of the company’s development, however. Before the new millennium came, Charter took another step into new territory by going public in November 1999 and trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange.
- It had managed to catapult itself from the previously mentioned 1 million customers in 1998 to almost quadruple that with 3.9 million customers before 1999 was finished.
- Charter completed more than ten significant acquisitions in that year alone, which played a crucial role in the growth, including Avalon Cable TV, Falcon Cable TV and Fanch Communications Inc.
A less costly approach was simultaneously carried out in which Charter swapped customers with other systems to make their customers more geographically clustered. This made their services more efficient for both them and their competitors, who they swapped with, meaning less wasted resources, lower costs and the possibility of offering lower costs to customers. Economic cooperation is often a win-win for everyone involved. The largest of these swaps was in December 1999 when Charter signed a letter of intent with AT&T corporation to swap 1.3 million subscribers in St Lours, Alabama, Georgia and Missouri.
The new millennium started great for Charter. Cultural Whirlwind MSN signed an agreement with the company in which Charter’s broadband customers were offered MSN content, which was highly sought-after at the time. This constant succession of manoeuvres, acquisitions and expansions wasn’t going unnoticed, and the Association for Corporate Growth presented Charter with the Outstanding Corporate Growth Award in 2001. It also received the Fast 50 Award for Growth from the St. Louis Regional Chamber and Growth Association and the Ted Turner Innovator of the Year Award from the Southern Cable Telecommunications Association.
However, by the decade’s end, things were looking less rosy. Things couldn’t remain perfect forever. In 2008 Nasdaq warned Charter to comply with its standards after failing to meet them. Only a year later, in 2009, the company announced that it planned to file for bankruptcy, and the plan was approved in November of that year. Although the ordeal extinguished its stock, it also managed to cut around £8 billion off the massive total that it had managed to rack up.
What is the Future of Charter Communications
Things are looking more stable for the company now. A new direction has seen them again look to cooperation rather than focus purely on competition, and in 2017 Charter and Comcast announced collaborative plans in which they would look into working with one another in different aspects in “the wireless space”.
Charter Communications – To Conclude
The company is not quite back in another golden era yet, with fines coming in 2018 from the New York Public Service Commission, among other regulatory threats. Several blunders have seen them delete the email accounts of around 14000 customers and receive public backlash for collaborating with targeted advertising firm NebuAd on highly invasive web monitoring practices.
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